Delay Formal Instruction!

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a BBC News article that piqued my interest. According to a new review of primary education in England, it was recommended that children should not start formal learning until they are six. Instead, children should continue the play-based learning typically featured in pre-K for another year. Dame Gillian Pugh, who co-authored the review stated that four and five-year-olds tended to be at a stage where they were just “tuning in” to learning and that they could be “turned off” if they were made to follow too formal a curriculum, too early on. That’s also the message found in Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax, a family physician and psychologist.

In Boys Adrift, Sax brings up the case of Finland. Finland has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Its students score consistently high on all the international rankings, yet formal education doesn’t start until seven! Sax states, “How could starting kids in school two years later lead to superior performance when those children become teenagers? Simple. If kids start school two years later and are taught material when they are developmentally prepared to learn, kids are less likely to hate school. If kids don’t hate school, it’s easier to get them to learn.”

So, how is this relevant to us in the Judo community? What does classroom learning have to do with learning Judo? As I frequently tell people, Judo is a special sport, but not so special that we can ignore the findings of scientific research, or the principles of pedagogy. Regardless of the subject matter, learning is learning. The dynamics of the elementary school classroom are pretty much the dynamics of your average Judo class.

During my last trip to the Bahamas, I had the chance to visit a club I had not been to in my previous trips. I was there with the president of the Bahamas Judo Federation to run a coaching clinic. We arrived early, sat down alongside several parents, and caught the tail end of the children’s class. My eyes were drawn to two darling little children, probably 4- or 5-years old, who were standing there on the side of the mat under the watchful eyes of an assistant coach. They were trying to perform static uchi komi with each other: lots of corrections, little activity, no dynamic movement, no smiles, no laughter, no joy, no fun…frustrated, totally lost, and bored out of their gourds. Needless to say, it was difficult to stop myself from screaming, “What the heck are you doing to those poor kids?” or from running onto the mat to save those kids from their coach and snatch them from despair. I looked at the president, he looked at me, and without talking we both knew we were thinking the same thing. How long would it be before the two children quit Judo? It was clearly a case of formal instruction at the wrong time with the wrong students.

This story is the rule rather than the exception in far too many clubs, because the teaching model of Judo instruction hasn’t evolved very much from the classical Japanese model of mat bashing, static uchi komi, and randori. We have failed to stay current with advancements made in other fields. We are so stuck on the formal and rigid approach to teaching Judo skills that we bore to death many of our beginners, and consequently fail to “hook” them to our sport.

Our pool of potential new students comes from what I call the “entertainment generation.” Members of the entertainment generation have many more forms of leisure activity to choose from than previous generations had. They enjoy having fun and being entertained. We need to recognize this shift in our society, and adjust our programs accordingly.

Embracing play-based learning or the more sports-specific “games-approach” to teaching Judo will help us reach the entertainment generation. The games-approach should be the primary model of instruction for not only 4-7 year olds, but for most children and most beginners. Formal instruction can be introduced when a player is ready, and no sooner. The games-approach will capture the interest of your students, and will increase the odds of retaining them in your program. And they’ll actually learn Judo to boot. It’s a win-win situation.

For information on my “games-approach” coaching clinics, please contact me at glafon@betterjudo.com.

5 thoughts on “Delay Formal Instruction!”

My daughter did not want to do Judo. We looked at videos and various websites showing children practicing Judo and competing in tournaments. She still did not want to do Judo. We went to Coach Lafon’s Judo America Club to watch a practice so she could see what she would be doing if she ended up doing Judo. After the initial meeting with Coach Lafon, I was a bit doubtful of the program as he had explained that he did not teach Judo in a traditional sense. What? A Japanese martial art with no kata? So we enter the main mat area and there are kids standing next to plastic rings thrown on the ground. The kids next to the rings were to prevent their partner from putting any part of their body in the ring. Right in front of where we sat there was a girl preparing to defend her ring against a boy her size. My daughter leaned over and whispers, ‘Geez, the girls have to against boys, that’s not fair.’ The coach yells go and the boy charges toward the ring and the little girl tackles him to the ground and squashes him flat, short of the ring. Both kids get up smiling and laughing. My daughter leans over to me and whispers, ‘Did you see that? How did she do that? Okay Dad I want to do this, that was cool.’ We watched the rest of the practice and I noticed the kids were working hard but having fun. It was our first experience with the games-approach. That weekend the club held a local tournament which my kid insisted we watch so I ended up on the outside of a large crowd of parents wondering how my daughter wiggled her way through the throng to be able to see the action on the mat. My oldest daughter has now been in Judo for 18 months and my youngest just over a year. I think if we had gone to a practice and had seen kids lined up doing drills repeatedly they would probably not be doing Judo today. I don’t know for sure since we stopped looking and signed up the following Monday. Since then my kids have been joined by their cousins on the mat. My niece passed her first promotion test last night and we are all proud of her. She has shed her shyness and become more confident. Her mom has told me that she no longer makes excuses not to go to Judo practice and looks forward to practices each week.

As a parent, I like the games-approach that Coach Lafon uses to teach Judo. For a kid just starting Judo, it gets him/her involved right away, gets them socialized with the class (especially the team type games), and they become used to the physical contact in short order. If you happen to see one of Coach Lafon’s students, ask him/her what their favorite game in class is and I bet a big smile is going to accompany their answer. Keep up the good work in growing Judo Coach!

I concede that to a certain degree there are more forms of leisure to the current generation pool but I don’t think that is quite as important to your point as identifying the mode or the delivery of the entertainment. What I mean to say by this is that production aims to stimulate quickly and efficiently. Movies are shorter and are packed with emotional roller coasters. Access to information, messages & people are instant. It’s no wonder than when people get into nature that they’re bored because one is enculturated at a very young age to be constantly pinged with stimuli. Dually, Judo in America doesn’t have the value that baseball has for example, but look at how popular it is despite the 3 hour long games and how bloody boring it is. But because society values it, kids as young as 4 will begin to play in leagues and stick with it. I think focusing on these two points do a better job of highlighting why there needs to be a change in how we teach Judo, especially to the younger ones. Good message Jerry